Related papers: Cosmology Solved?
A successor to the standard hot big-bang cosmology is emerging. It greatly extends the highly successful hot big-bang model. A key element of the New Standard Cosmology is dark energy, the causative agent for accelerated expansion. Dark…
These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with…
A popular science article designed to introduce people familiar with basic cosmological nomenclature with models alternative to cosmological inflation. The paper briefly discusses the modern view of the Big Bang model, inflation (both its…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
The changes of main paradigms on the structure and evolution of the Universe are reviewed. Two puzzles of the modern cosmology, the mean density of matter and the regularity of the Universe on large scales, as well as the possibility to…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…
The good agreement between large-scale observations and the predictions of the now-standard $\Lambda$CDM theory gives us hope that this will become a lasting foundation for cosmology. After briefly reviewing the current status of the key…
A unified description of inflation, dark energy, and dark matter is presented within a two-scalar-field cosmological model. Inflation, assumed to be of the warm type, is driven by one of the scalar fields, which, shortly after the end of…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
A basic modern picture of the universe is given here. The lectures start from the historical ideas of a static universe. Then I move on to Newtonian cosmology and derive the main cosmological equations in the framework of Newtonian…
We find that general relativity can be naturally free of cosmological singularities. Several nonsingular models are currently available that either assume ad hoc matter contents, or are nonsingular only over a sector of solution space of…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
A precise measurement of the curvature of the Universe is of primeval importance for cosmology since it could not only confirm the paradigm of primordial inflation but also help in discriminating between different early Universe scenarios.…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
Cosmology is operating now on a well established and tightly constraining empirical basis. The relativistic LambdaCDM hot big bang theory is consistent with all the present tests; it has become the benchmark. But the many open issues in…
The "new standard cosmology", based on the theory of inflation, has very impressive observational support. I review some outstanding problems of the new cosmology and the global view of the universe -- the multiverse -- that it suggests. I…
After decades of successful hot big-bang paradigm, Cosmology still lacks a framework in which the early inflationary phase of the universe smoothly matches the radiation epoch and evolves to the present `quasi' de Sitter spacetime. No less…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
The standard big bang cosmology has been greatly successful in explaining many observational aspects of the real universe. However, two particular diffficulties faced by it are the so-called ``horizon'' and ``flatness'' problems. By…